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Monday, February 2, 2015

Adventures in Barrel Aging

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

Friday, Izzy stopped by Seven Stills of San Francisco, which is a local distillery that makes whiskey by distilling craft beer. Distilling is essentially the process of heating wort (you know, that solution of water, sugar, etc that you get during the brewing process) until it evaporates… and with alcohol being lighter than water, it will pass through the process more efficiently, producing a solution with higher alcohol content. Basically, after a few times, it’ll take about 5 gallons of beer that’s normally about 5% ABV… and turn it into about a gallon of whiskey that’s more like 40% ABV. Then Seven Stills will age this whiskey in a charred oak barrel for a few months or years depending on what they want to do with it. In this case, they had filled these barrels with whiskey distilled from a coffee porter… so on top of the smoked oak flavors from the barrel… and the whiskey portion, there’s also a little hint of coffee & malty porter in there too… but honestly, for my pallet, I’m sure the burn of the 30-40% ABV will pretty much conquer that until it wears off on the back end. I’m curious to try their shine though… and in the meantime, they were offering some of their smaller five-gallon barrels to our homebrewer’s guild to make some delicious brews… and so we picked up one of their barrels to age some of our homebrew.

What we decided to do with our barrel is use it to age our Imperial Stout that has been aging for the past few months in my apartment. The result is taking our Imperial Stout which should already have a strong malty backbone with molasses, caramel, chocolate and vanilla notes up front… and then with the barrel aging will bring out some of that smokiness from the charred oak and possible some of that lingering coffee & whiskey notes that has soaked into the wood on the back end… which should make for a great full bodied beer (with about a 10-13% ABV overall) ready just in time for my birthday in April. First though, we have to prepare the barrel…

When you get the barrel, because of a multitude of things… like it being made of wood… and bacteria & other things can get into it VERY easily… and frankly, we have no idea where this thing has been other than passed along through a warehouse in the Dogpatch for the past few months/years… we have to do a few things to unsure that we don’t get a lot of living things growing & reproducing in our beer besides our own yeast in the stout. The first step is to clean the barrel up a bit on the outside (luckily this one was pretty well maintained).

Mmm... smellovision... check out the oak layers...

Then you’ll usually get enough water to fill up the barrel and let it soak overnight to make sure that the wood hasn’t shrunk a little bit & left gaps between the wood planks that comprise the barrel. Again, luckily this is a fairly fresh barrel so we didn’t have to do the overnight thing… but this brings up another point.

Sidenote on Barrel Maintenance: If you’re going to use a barrel for multiple brews (which we intend to) then you never really want the barrel to be empty. That’s to say, you always want liquid in the barrel. If we didn’t have a batch of beer ready to put in it this weekend, then we would’ve put five gallons of water in there. This is to make sure that the barrel doesn’t dry out & crack or just cause the barrel to become less uniform and leak. We plan on having our next batch ready to go when we take our Imperial Stout out in a few months… but to be honest, we have no idea what it’s going to be just yet. Also, just as a rule of thumb, after about three batches of so… your barrel IS going to get a bit of an infection, meaning that some bacteria and/or wild yeasts are going to get into the wood. However, these yeasts that would otherwise just sour your beer (because you can’t brew anything that’ll kill you, just taste unexpected) can also be utilized to make some rather unique Sour Beers or bring out different flavors in an old recipe that you might want to try or experiment with. Some of the world’s most unique & highly regarded beers are from process like this. So yeah, we’ll probably try something like that with our 3rd or 4th batch with this barrel… but that’s a bit down the road. For now, let’s continue to prepare this barrel for our first barrel aging batch…

The next step is to disinfect the inside of the barrel. We do this by heating up enough water to fill the barrel (in this case, five gallons) to somewhere between 140-180 degrees Fahrenheit. Water this hot will kill any bacteria and other organisms that it comes into contact with. In this case, we were on the high end of 170 degrees because better safe than sorry. I’ve read that the higher the water temp, the more stuff is taken out of the oak (in this case whiskey) but it’s probably just a miniscule difference between 145 & 175… and we just don’t want bad things growing & then dying in our beer. This also takes the place of other sanitizers such as StarSan or One Step because the chemicals in those are bad for the oak from what I understand. Anyway, you leave the water in there for about 45-60 minutes… and then you drain it… pulling out what appears to be heavily diluted whiskey from the barrel as well as any floaty things that you don’t want in your beer…

Once the water has been drained… now your barrel is ready to receive your brew…

From there, you just transfer it into the barrel, plug the top with a bung & stopper, and set in a cool, dark place for a while. Well, technically you probably don’t really need it to be that dark since it’s surrounded in oak & light won’t get through… but don’t put it in sunlight or anything, that’ll dry out that oak REAL quick & cause cracks. We put it in our brewery corner. Also, as far as how long you want to leave it be… there are a few trains of thought, but it’s really up to you. Some just give it a set amount of time… and then bottle or keg when the time has passed, of course checking periodically to make sure that the pressure release stopper on top is still bubbling periodically. Others test the beer periodically through a little sampling port or just scooping some out of the barrel… but that can obviously lead to more infection from the open air or the vessel used to get the sample. It’s your barrel, do what you want… we’ll be keeping an eye on the bubbling… and probably checking and/or bottling around the first part of April, depending on the activity. That way we can get a LOT of whiskey out of the oak… and it’ll have to be quite a lot of be noticeable in the Imperial Stout… and we have some high gravity yeast in there anyway (had to repitch a little bit just before Christmas) so it’s still working pretty good.

Cleaning out the carboy with PBW...

We also sampled some of our Imperial Stout as is… and it’s f**king delicious. Like I mentioned earlier, very rich, malty, molasses & caramel notes, hint of vanilla… and you get a little bit of burn as well because… if my calculations are correct going from 1.088 OG to 1.010 gravity reading right now… it’s already about 11% ABV and now it’s being soaked in a whiskey barrel… and still bubbling away… so it should be pretty potent… and have a LOT of different flavors giving it a full body flavor (hopefully not too dry since it’s turning a lot of the sugars into booze, but so far so good). Anyway, we’ll obviously keep you posted.

Since we had everything out, we also transferred our Ramble Tamble Red Ale into the secondary fermenter… and thanks to being an all-grain recipe, dry hopping AND remembering the Whirfloc tablet this time… there was a lot of trube to be cleared out… but the beer is looking great…

After doing beer stuff, we headed a few houses down to J-Mo’s Smash Party… you know, setting up old Nintendo gaming systems (N64 & GameCube this time) and playing games of our youth? Well, I never had an N64 or GameCube, so this was my first time playing games like “Goldeneye” & “Super Smash Brothers” but I’ve obviously played similar games… apparently these were the original 4-player first person shooter & battle field style games… and honestly, they held up pretty good. Of course the 1997 graphics from “Goldeneye” are nothing compared to 2015 ANYTHING but for being almost 20 years old… you can definitely tell who is who at least… and the gameplay is pretty good too. I can see why this is always on the lists of Top 25 games of all time. We of course also played some “Super Mario Kart” as that’s just a fun f**king party game… so yeah, good times.

Sunday was the Super Bowl Party at Izzy’s Aunts… and we brought some beer… and some beer muffins… and it was just amazing fun… and of course my predictions were really, really, really, really close. I was one point off the final score (Patriots scored 28 instead of 27) and the game did technically end on an interception by the Patriots Defense… but it was their 3rd string situational corner instead of Darrelle Revis. That’s pretty close… and let’s face it, Katy Perry was the real winner of the Super Bowl.

Anyway, that’s about all I have for this weekend… but plenty more fun still coming up this next week… including a batch of Cider, making another batch of “Damn Good Beer” with Izzy’s Aunts, and a wonderful dinner at Elevation 66 Brewing coming up next Monday. Have a great day everybody!!! Oh… and one more thing…